A few years back my Grandfather, an avid yard-saler, sent me a set of these comics courses from the 50’s mainly put together by Coulton Waugh but featuring lots of articles by now-legendary cartoonists including Frank King, Ernie Bushmiller and others. Here is an article by Frank King, creator of Gasoline Alley. Click the images to zoom in. Reproduced with kind permission from the Art Instruction Schools (www.artinstructionschools.edu).

Growing up with computer games in the age of the visionary developer(s) I was treated to some unique experiences, one of my favorite of which was the Space Quest series by Mark Crowe, Scott Murphy and Sierra On-Line. If you aren’t familiar, it combined science fiction tropes, comedy, parody, dark humor and puzzles with fantastic artwork which straddled the transition from overly pixelated 16 color EGA to the breakthrough of *gasp* 256 color VGA! Both the EGA and VGA art look fantastic in my opinion. The inspiration of the creators really came through in these games and it’s partly their fault I keep banging my head against the wall trying to make sci-fi comedy comics.